Phill Kline, former Kansas Attorney General and current law professor at Liberty University School of Law, said the Supreme Court’s rejection to hear the case Lee v. Poudre School District appears to stem from what he describes as a troubling trend of lower courts manipulating or omitting key facts in parental rights cases to shield them from Supreme Court review.
The case involves two students who attended a Gender and Sexualities Alliance (GSA) meeting where gender identity was discussed and were advised not to inform their parents.
Both students later experienced emotional distress and were withdrawn from school. Their parents sued the Poudre School District, alleging a violation of their Fourteenth Amendment parental substantive-due-process rights.
After the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado dismissed the complaint without prejudice, the parents amended their complaint to focus solely on a claim against the school district for monetary damages.
The district court denied the motion to amend, concluding that the parents had failed to plausibly allege municipal liability.
In the parents’ appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, the appeals court affirmed the district court’s decision, holding that the parents did not plausibly allege that the school district’s official policy was the moving force behind their alleged injuries.
The appeals court found that the parents failed to establish a direct causal link between the district’s policies and the constitutional injury they claimed.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court declined to review the case.
On Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Kline argued that while the facts raised serious concerns about schools encouraging gender transitions without parental knowledge, the Supreme Court likely declined the case because it was procedurally ill-suited to address the core constitutional issue.
Kline explained the legal hurdles the case faced, particularly under the Monell doctrine, which protects school districts from lawsuits unless there is an official policy directly causing harm.
He said the Supreme Court, which typically does not delve deeply into factual disputes but accepts lower court findings, rejected the case because it was not ideal to address the broader constitutional question of whether schools can infringe on parents’ rights in gender transition matters.
“Under the Monell doctrine…parents suing schools have to show that an official school policy directly caused the harm visited upon the child and the parent-child relationship. That’s where the 10th Circuit said the facts don’t necessarily support that,” Kline explained.
Kline predicted that while this case won’t be decided this term, the Supreme Court is interested in addressing the issue in the future, noting how he believes the Court will eventually take on a case that protects parental rights regarding school involvement in students’ gender transitions.
“The Supreme Court is always reluctant to get into factual detail, it accepts the facts as presented by the lower courts, and did not see this case as well positioned to bring up the primary issue, which is can school districts violate parental rights, the constitutional rights of parents when it comes to this gender ideology issue? I think the court wants that case, but it wants the case situated where there’s not the other concern of the Monell doctrine that there is an official school policy that directly caused the harm. This case, according to the lower courts, did not reach that standard,” Kline said.
“The court wants the right case to come before it to address the issue of whether it’s a violation of parental rights for school districts to essentially start changing the physicality of a child without parental knowledge or consent, and I think the court’s going to eventually come down with a very important case that’s protective of parental rights,” he added.
Kline went on to point out the significance of the separate statement from Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch, who expressed concern about courts’ reluctance to address whether schools violate parental rights by encouraging gender transition without parental knowledge or consent.
In that statement, the Justices said they are “concerned” that some federal courts are tempted to avoid the question of whether or not a school district violates parents’ fundamental rights “when, without parental knowledge or consent, it encourages a student to transition to a new gender or assists in that process.”
Kline interpreted the Justices’ statement as a strong message that lower courts should not use procedural technicalities or cherry-picked facts to avoid tackling important constitutional questions, saying he views it as an implicit criticism of judicial tactics that prevent such cases from reaching the Supreme Court.
“It’s actually a pretty strong implied statement that courts should not use procedural rules to defeat and find facts that are unsupported of the procedural rules in order to prevent the addressing of an important constitutional issue,” Kline said.
“I have seen it where lower courts would ignore clear factual basis for litigation and then pull forth selective facts that are more tenuous and use those facts to reject issues like standing and concrete harm, which is a part of standing to reject cases to prevent them from ever addressing the issue. It’s a strong statement by Alito that the court wants to address this issue,” he added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
